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http://www.shirky.com/writings...
"This strategy [of micropayments] doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. ... Like the salami slicing exploit in computer crime, micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by lowering the dollar cost of goods. Worse, beneath a certain threshold, mental transaction costs actually rise, a phenomenon is especially significant for information goods. It's easy to think a newspaper is worth a dollar, but is each article worth half a penny? Is each word worth a thousandth of a penny? A newspaper, exposed to the logic of micropayments, becomes impossible to value. ..."

My alternative solution is a *mix* of four types of economic activities:
* people producing their own personal content through better personal tools (subsistence production)
* a basic income (to soften the rough edges and rich-get-richer exchange economy)
* people giving away high-quality content (gift economy)
* more government funding of free information providers (an improved democratically-planned command economy)

The promotion of artificial scarcity (e.g. paywalls for digital content) as a way to fund content is one of the biggest problems we are facing as we transition to post-scarcity. There are several reason artificial scarcity is a problem -- but one of the biggest is that ensuring artificial scarcity in an age of technological abundance ultimately requires the equivalent of a police state monitoring everything everyone does 24X7.

See also Alfie Kohn: http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic... and Dan Pink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you haven't seen this essay by Clay Shirky, you might find it interesting.

I'm not sure if this will be useful in the specific context you describe, but I do think that this might capture some of the possible issues you did not directly consider. I wrote the submission to the 'other' site and got back maybe 3-4 interesting responses. Here is what I wrote with a link to the comments below:

We recently discussed reddit's woes and the hiring of a new CEO. However, we have seen communities come and go for many years.

Clay Shirky wrote about his experience in 1978:
"Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue... And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. ... the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. ... the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom."

There are two clear trends. One is that less input and customization tends to grow bigger. Note how Geocities was replaced with Myspace which was then replaced with Facebook and Twitter. These newer systems take away personal freedom of expression and makes people follow a 'prescribed' system, albeit an easier one to use. The other trend is that communities that try to be truly free and open end up either stifled by that openness or give up. The only obvious exception is a platform that allows us to simply filter out everything we don't want to see, which becomes a series of the feared echo chamber. With the excessive amount of data and the build up of complex rules on how information is shared, where does this leave us? It seems that like the famous iron triangle allowing free (and legal) speech with the possibility of diverse opinions, a cohesive group, and growth only allows you to pick two.

It seems to me this is a wicked problem, perhaps unsolvable. But I wonder if the community thinks there are other design options? Is this even possible with human nature as it is?

https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/07/18/0821234

- JCD

Not long ago I was reading a recent discussion on reddit's woes and the hiring of a new CEO. It made me think how we have seen communities come and go for many years.

Clay Shirky wrote about his experience in 1978: "Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue... And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. ... the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. ... the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom."

There are two clear trends. One is that less input and customization tends to grow bigger. Note how Geocities was replaced with Myspace which was then replaced with Facebook and Twitter. These newer systems take away personal freedom of expression and makes people follow a 'prescribed' system, albeit an easier one to use. The other trend is that communities that try to be truly free and open end up either stifled by that openness or give up. The only obvious exception is a platform that allows us to simply filter out everything we don't want to see, which becomes a series of the feared echo chamber. With the excessive amount of data and the build up of complex rules on how information is shared, where does this leave us? It seems that like the famous iron triangle allowing free (and legal) speech with the possibility of diverse opinions, a cohesive group, and growth only allows you to pick two.

It seems to me this is a wicked problem, perhaps unsolvable. But I wonder what you think regarding what other design options exist? Is this even possible with human nature as it is? Which do you value most: free speech, a cohesive group or growth?

Churchill said "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.".

The same can be said with technology in general... social and technical factors are deeply intertwined. It's true that individual character help shapes the final outcome/feel of a community, but that's just one factor out of many.

You may find this essay by Clay Shirky interesting: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

It's not just the world that changes, it's you. A group is its own worst enemy.

_

I meant to find a real example of another lazy network tech., sabotaging for the sake of self-aggrandization or for getting out of work, but I couldn't find an example easily, or think of the search-terms that would do it. ("Self-aggrandization" didn't lead to much..., though there are some good reads like http://www.metafilter.com/88359/Not-enough-women-have-what-it-takes-to-behave-like-arrogant-selfaggrandizing-jerks

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9034438/Former_network_engineer_faces_jail_time_for_sabotaging_patient_data ) but that last one is more of a criminal sociapath.

. And there was the San Francisco City Network administrator who refused to hand over his password, even to his boss or the mayor until he was taken to court on a criminal charge.

If you know any other good tech example, I'd love to know about it.

you might want to read some of Clay Shirky's work because, guess what, the old model is suddenly insufficient.

It's not a new idea, it's been explored before and it only works in certain cases. Take a look at Ontologies are overrated. From the section called "Mind Reading":

You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or with the catalogers, about the best way to categorize. They also underestimate the loss from erasing difference of expression, and they overestimate loss from the lack of a thesaurus.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

(I'm not claiming anything about the fairness of the U.S. economy, just pointing to an argument that suggests it shouldn't be real surprising)

Sounds like you're a flavor aid fan.

If by that you mean I'm in favor of a new entity that seems to be thinking about the whole deal more holistically then yes please, pass me some of that. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/transcript-of-openleaks-video/

If you want to have something secure then it's going to be run by a small group.

What about their model appears unsecure to you,..specifically? There are only 12 of em in the office at present. Or do I miss your point?

If you're just taking the information from anonymous sources without any way of knowing who it is that's leaking it you're going to fail miserably.

Agreed. But what leads you to be sure there won't be avenues to verify or that they are accepting sources that they aren't verifying? Perhaps you're right, in which case I agree, it's a fools errand. But everything I read leads me to believe these guys aren't as dumb as you seem to think they are, and that there will be checks both on their end and furthermore at the publishers end where they will still need to do their job and confirm before they run with a story. And if they fail, so what really? I guess time will tell if the model works or not of course.

But the only reason I can see to be rooting against these guys is guy fawkes worship frankly. Everything gets better if it works, and if it's crap, it fails and we're left with one less channel of free information that so many claim is the point. ...So tell me sir who seems to hope for their failure...is that flavoraid in my hand or perhaps yours?

The last paragraph of this article ( from *2002*: http://www.shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html ) says it best:

"There are no pure engineering solutions here, because this is not a pure engineering problem. Human interest in names is a deeply wired characteristic, and it creates political and legal issues because names are genuinely important. In the 4 years since its founding, ICANN has moved from being merely unaccountable to being actively anti-democratic, but as reforming or replacing ICANN becomes an urgent problem, we need to face the dilemma implicit in namespaces generally: Memorable, Global, Non-political -- pick two."

So please, let's quit with all this talk about "replacing" the DNS. Get real, kids.

I liked your point, and agree with it to the extent. Still, there are other social dynamics at work here moving in a post-scarcity direction towards a fundamental social change where "success" is redefined as it takes fewer people to produce enough for everyone. So, powerful tools can change how we can and should use them if we are to avoid irony (as suggested in my sig line).

And then, there is the issue of what sorts of internet tools groups of various sorts really need to be healthy groups. I'm not sure anyone fully understands that yet. And it may vary based on the group, even with some groups maybe being better off without any internet tools?

From something my wife just wrote:
    "It takes all kinds, even on the internet"
    http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/10/it-takes-all-kinds-even-on-internet.html
"Sadly, the thing Gladwell gets wrong (and lots of people have already pointed this out so I won't elaborate) is that weak and strong ties, and hierarchies and meshworks, are not polar opposites. They intermingle and interpenetrate, and they influence and sometimes become each other. I agree that social media support weak ties more than they support strong ties. But people interact in many ways. The whole thing is not as simple or strong as he makes it out -- and that in itself is telling, as I will explain. ... I still think the internet doesn't work very well for small groups working together towards common goals, and I still want to help it get better at that. But this experience has given me new respect for what extraverted people can do with extraverted tools, and a new interest in supporting interactions among both introverts and extraverts. I'd say the most important thing I have learned in the past week is this. People who care about social activism on the internet need to be more aware of how our own personalities affect what we think everyone needs. And we need to build tools that work with, not just in spite of, our diverse ways of interacting. It's not good enough to say our tools work for some ways of interacting and connecting -- yours or mine. We need to make everyone part of the solution, if we don't want to build more problems."

So, tools can make a big difference to *groups*, in terms of affecting group dynamics. Clay Shirky talks a little about this in "A group is its own worst enemy".
    http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Or Doug Englebart's point on the need for a goupr and its tools to co-evolve.
    http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html

Your point certainly applies to individuals and connects to "a bad crasftsman blames his tools".

But what if you are a tool maker, not just a tool user? What do you learn from all this discussion and experience about how to change the nature of our social tools to promote or sustain key values of democracy/accountability, joy, health, prosperity, community, and intrinsic/mutual security?

Yes.
Ctrl-F vilification

I agree with your point about the need for analysis first (basically, simulation), as I said in this reply to another poster:
    http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1531702&cid=30977230
But with that said, a lot of analysis involves a co-evolution of tools and designs and the community, as Doug Engelbart talked about.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
So, there is a lot of value to considering the whole system at once and iterating on it in a free and open source way. This is sort of like the Wikipedia software co-evolving with the content and the user community (although it had a proprietary start at first). Clay Shirky talks about some of these coevolution ideas too:
    http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
But even more than what you outline, it seems a group of four people with some funding might have the most leverage creating a critical mass of information about space habitation to the point where thousands of others were helping on a voluntary basis.

Now, it may be that micropayments work at a level between the retailer and the wholesaler. For example, google could pay micropayments to useful sources, or I could subscribe to a news source or listen to a radio station. The author/band/whoever gets paid via aggregated micropayments, but I don't actually make a micropayment. That is, historically, a sound business model, but making people decide on an article-by-article basis whether they want to read the whole thing for a penny is nuts.

The market is failing for several mathematical reasons, so Sowell, even though wrong about many historic psychological things, is irrelevant (look up Marshall Sahlin's work on "The Original Affluent Society" or Alfie Kohn's work on motivation with lots of references to the scientific literature).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

The market does not account well for positive or negative externalities (stuff like pollution).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
The market can not price in its own systemic risk of failure from bubbles or banking failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_risk
The market can not distribute income widely when a few players have most of the capital, resulting in unmet human needs and starvation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
The market needs human labor less and less because of automation and better design, producing falling wages and increasing unemployment, given limited demand for most consumer goods in the long term beyond some basic saturation level that the USA has already overshot and the globe will soon catch up with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Cheaper computers are driving the cost of everything towards zero by supporting better design and smarter devices, but even cheap stuff is too expensive if you don't have a job.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/divide.html
Real markets (as opposed to theoretical ones) often have the richest players changing the laws in their favor (and even in a libertarian ideal, the richest can become the government through purchasing military might or votes).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
All these factors are creating market problems. The current economic collapse is one aspect of that. Things will only get worse in all of these ways. The market has many virtues, but those virtues can not be realized in an extreme form without various controls on the market (legal, social, religious, whatever).

There are many economic simulations about these issues. There are many negative real examples (Iceland) and positive examples (Western Europe with a stronger social safety net is doing better in the collapse; all industrialized countries that have comprehensive medical care pay less for medical care that has better outcomes; kids are happier in most other industrialized countries, etc.). The USA is even getting to be a less and less happy place for the rich who can afford health care, as emergency rooms go on diversion and epidemics get spread through poor people who have less resistance. And even if you are wealthy in the USA, it is only too easy to lose it all, as Bernie Madoff's clients can attest to. But the fact is, for most people, losing money to Madoff is a fantasy, and they live paycheck to paycheck, and the social tension is rising right now with rising unemployment and collapsing social institutions (even the shelters are closing for lack of money). We are just in the beginnings of this unless we take serious action as a society to deal with these *structural* issues with a failing economic control system and a dysfunctional (fossil fuel based) physical plant.

You are asking for a higher level of proof than created the current disaster. That's a good thing to do, I agree. It is a fair demand. That kind of evidence is the kind of thing someone like Bill Gates could make real inroads into with more computer simulations and with his foundation funding regional alternative experiments (like a basic income in a town), if he had a tr

that is like complaining that phones or the web are overrated and pointless because most of the content is of no interest to you.

I disagree. It would be more like complaining that the 5-second time limit for phone calls, or the 140-byte limit for web pages is pointless... except that these limits don't exist.

You don't have to read those posts you know!

But you do have to wade through them if you're trying to find something interesting - which is the exact problem with Twitter.

Here's a rundown on why (and virtually everybody I've ever met) dislikes twitter:

Prelude: Traditional publishing relies on publishers and editors deciding what everyone should read. They take massive amounts of information, and strip out the crap (as they see it.) Blogging changes that - there are no publishers, we rely on other methods (reputation, moderation, etc) to filter the crap from the good stuff. (Clay Shirkey touches on that here, among other things, if you want a great read. :)

I've tried twitter a couple of times, but keep getting turned off by one simple thing: There doesn't appear to be any filtering mechanism. Everyone I've talked to about it says the same thing.

When I've met (online or off) someone interesting enough to want to follow their twitter feed, I went to their page, looking for a stream of what they've posted recently (maybe the last few days or weeks.) Instead, I'm greeted by one post from them, followed by masses of "replies" from people I don't know, saying things I really don't care about. I went to Twitter to find something, and Twitter makes it impossible to find it.

When I describe this to people I've met, they agree that this is why they don't use it - there's too much crap they don't want, and it's impossible (not just very difficult - actually impossible) to find what you do want.

Now, maybe it's just because I'm Canadian, but maybe not.

following the odd celebrity like the mythbusters is interesting.

Well, it might be, if there wasn't so much crap from other people on that page.

That and lack of a decent micropayment solution.

Oh come on. Seriously - I thought we'd all agreed years ago that micropayments were doomed to failure?

The lack of a decent micropayment is the lack of micropayments as a decent solution.

As Clay Shirky argued, the newspaper itself is somewhat misplaced in an era where it is nearly free to copy and distribute information. What's the point of arguing over whether your pig ought to be pink or brown - it still won't fly.

No.

(long story short: Internet killed newspapers like Gutenberg's press killed Bible monopoly by the Church, newspapers just don't know it yet)

This isn't all that rare on Twitter. #amazonfail is a good example of the Twitter jumping to conclusions and blowing something way out of proportion.

That day can't come soon enough. I find nostalgia to be a meaningless form of mental masturbation, and a particularly dangerous one when it delays inevitable progress.

"When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem."

Sure the business model of the internet news feed can beat the Rocky Mountain News trying to sell content thrown on your front yard. But none of those "outlets" originate the news content, they regurgitate what someone else paid a reporter to generate. Freedom of the press means that you can print what you want and the government cannot stop you. It does not mean consumers are entitled to all of the news for free just because it exists. Before the net gave you access were you entitled to a free daily copy of the New York Times in your home, office, or coffee shop? Even when you live in Omaha? Just because MSN will give you an article for free does not make it free to generate. What happens to freedom of the press when the "printing press" is free? Will the news business degenerate into something that looks like tech review websites? Where they decide what to review and what to say about something based on who is giving them a free sample and who is paying the freight? Will you be able to trust your news site when what they publish is based on web clicks and flash ads? Whose feet do you hold to the fire when a blog post is repeated around the world and it turns out to be made up by a drunk in Waco who was bored on a Friday night? Will Google print an apology and a retraction?

Although there are similarities to the music business, at least there you have clubs, concert tours etc where a group of guys who want to make a living in the business can do so even if 90% of what they generate is pirated off the net for free. How many of you will go to a Ruben Navarrette, Charles Krauthammer or David Ignatius concert? They write columns for the Washington Post Writers Group, syndicated in almost 200 papers nationwide. You have probably read some of their stuff on your favorite news feed. How do real news reporters make a living when there is no one to pay for what they write? They quit the news business and turn it over to Perez Hilton.

Welcome to the Idiocracy

It's just taking a while because we're emotionally attached to things like paper news.

But it's a process and the over-valuation of old media models are upheld by vested interests. Our current cable networks add nothing to the mix except for the occasional cornerscreen logo.

Ten years ago there would be no way to identify and fund popular content without cable companies. In ten years time there will be very few, if any, cable companies left - with virtually all production funded from web advertising revenue.

Getting from here to there is the tricky part, but it is inevitable.

Meanwhile, the access to real information, which helps keep society free, dies off.

The Internet has done more for freedom in society than any other single force.

Newspapers are indeed the only people employing reporters currently. Although journalism will not die, newspapers certainly will if they continue to willfully avert their eyes from the writing on the wall. We don't know what the outcome of this upheaval will be. But I'm pretty sure blaming Google and calling Schmidt names isn't a way to resolve it. I will once again point to Clay Shirky's article on the subject: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Google struggled to come up with a business model too. Now that their revenue is through the roof, people point to them and say: "Well that's obvious." Bold experimentation or visionary stubbornness is needed to latch onto a business model that WILL work in the Internet age. True, the Internet didn't creep up on them overnight, but a sea change can stretch on for years. Clay Shirky's article on this point makes sense to me: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

On a similar vein, I think the reason we're not seeing the answers right now are partly because of an over-valuation of the old forms of media advertising.

Imagine a world where instead of going to thepiratebay, you could - for the price of a login and supplying some demographic information - legally download your favourite shows. Imagine if these files had one minute of targeted advertising embedded at the start - short enough that most times you might not even bother fast-forwarding through it.

Such adverts could represent higher-value for advertisers, reducing the need for the "1/3rds adverts to every 2/3rds of content" shotgun approach we currently are subjected to.

The only things standing in the way of this are the existing networks and cable companies who parasitically feed off the entertainment production industry and add nothing but an initial funding capital, the requirement of which has been propagated by the imperfect flow of information which the internet corrects -- an infrastructure like YouTube could sell $1 shares in the next Joss Whedon project, or "pets wearing hats" channel, and everyone would be happy.

But until new media asserts its muscle with regards the value it can provide advertisers, and wrestles control away from our bloated old-media, we'll be stuck in this limbo of litigation and thinking the alternative is limited to "Ask a Ninja".

You may ask, why wouldn't people still go to thepiratebay and get advertless-clips, thus destroying the model? They certainly will if they are paranoid about giving out any information, if they do not have the option to fast-forward through ads, or if the ads themselves are too long or not targeted. But for most folks, ease-of-use of a single-source, and guaranteed quality would be strong retention factors I think.

You leave out one detail: The Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune will both be going under within five years, unless something is done to prop them up.

The question isn't so much whether subsidizing the Deseret News will give it an unfair advantage -- the question is whether to subsidize newspapers or let them all wither and die. In five years half of America's major cities will be without a daily newspaper; in ten it'll be down to the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and maybe the New York Times. The economics here are so strongly against the continued survival of the daily newspaper that one analyst found it would be cheaper for the NY Times to buy every subscriber a Kindle.

I'm stealing the link from about three posts downthread, but Clay Shirky's article on the (lack of a) future for newspapers is really worth reading if you're interested in this subject.

Not only that, but why are we trying to resuscitate the dying corpse of print media? If you got 10-20 min. This is a really great article on this subject. Elevator speech of the article: We don't need newspapers, we need journalism. There are opportunities to be had by these businesses, but they are unwilling to adapt and embrace them. **AA easily fit this same situation.

And our society often does marginalize people and make them poor (I'm not totally sure why).

http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Short answer: Network effect. Power/money/wealth is sticky, and tends to snowball.

Anyone wanting to get a better understanding of this needs to read around a bit more.

"... inequality can arise in systems where users are free to make choices among a large set of options, even in the absence of central control or manipulation. Inequality is not a priori evidence of manipulation, in other words; it can also be a side effect of large systems governed by popular choice. ... the debate on media concentration can now be sharpened to a single question: if inequality is a fact of life, even in diverse and free systems, what should our reaction be? "

Admittedly it has been some years since I used drupal. What initially appealed to me about it was powerful content classification (taxonomy) and then along came that Shirky essay. So I found myself thinking differently about the areas that (for me) drupal was strongest in.

These days, it's possible to set up a functional app using scaffolding etc... faster than you can scratch the surface of the Drupal API. By comparison, the API for my framework is a simple class loader and I'm not left fighting with any underlying assumptions about how the finished site should work.

Cheers

The studios screwed themselves on this one.

I think the secret to efficient social networking is decentralization, both of content and of standards.

Same thoughts here. But you still will not beat power laws. Perhaps adding user controlled/hosted 'semi-intelligent-agents' (beyond similarity metrics) as an aid to relation building would help.

CC.

Ah well, just another few hundred millions down the drain. It's only tax money, including mine.

Employers search Google about their candidates, partners about their potential dates. Who needs a centralized database - or even a format convention - for online reputation when it is already possible to get a good first impression of any person by the web trail they leave?

If anything, leaving this without a formal standard or central authority heads off problems with privacy or manipulation.

Formal reputation systems are useful at a local level. It works on Ebay, where there is only one type of transaction (a sale), and all reputation and references stems from how the party behaves on either end of the transaction. When transactions and relations become more complex, it might be best just to provide the raw information and let people make up their own minds about each other.

This is a good article, although it only touches on the topic in one section late in the text:

A Group is its own worst enemy, by Clay Shirky

http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism. html

*shrugs*

And all this time you thought it was just if and switch statements!

Whenever someone claims that a program is semantically aware, be sure to reread Clay Shirky's article on the Semantic web.

Right. And, unsupervised learning can be useful in some areas. Does anybody know how Google news works? It seems to work reasonably well, and seems to be solving the same problem.

Also note that for most purposes however classification is becoming less of a big deal. Read Clay Shirky's article to understand why. Shirkey talks about ontologies specifically, but the gist is the same -- basically, tagging each and every word isn't as crazy an idea if the end goal is just "I want to find something related" which is the most common case.

The semantic web would have to be feasible before it posed some sort of threat, so I wouldn't get too up in arms about this.

You seem to have completely missed the point. Tags aren't an alternative to text searches. They're an alternative to conventional categorization. Meta tag overloading isn't really a problem in most tag system implementations, and by the success of del.icio.us, it seems to be a very effective organizational system for web content. You can still do a text search on the collection, but tags give a more intuitive way of grouping related articles together using the benefits of folksonomy, which increase with the the size of the userbase. So Slashdot's implementation of tags seems to be very appropriate.

I stumbled across the above link while exploring LibraryThing as part of the research I've been conducting for a network library application I'm developing. I was looking for a way to categorize/catalog the ebooks in a virtual library and found conventional catagorization techniques to be inappropriate for a virtual collection. Genre hierarchies seemed inadequate for a collection not limited by physical restrictions. Most books tend to belong in multiple categories, and many subcategories have more than one obvious parent category. Tags seemed to be the perfect solution to the problem as it did not rely on a specific view of how things should be categorized and used a more web-like structure rather than the rigid hierarchical structure of conventional classification systems. This is also more in line with the web's overall structure where all the nodes are interconnected by hyperlinks in a folksonomic organization.

I would recommend reading that article and doing some more research on folksonomy before you dismiss the practical benefits of tagging as opposed to alternative organization methods.

Too bad that the Semantic Web is a pipe dream at the moment.

You can download the Semantic MediaWiki extension right now and add semantics to a wiki. Currently all the links between pages in a MediaWiki have no meaning, and all the facts in each page can only be extracted by humans reading it. With the upgrade a page can state [[is located in::California]] to explain the type of relationship implied by a link, and can express attribute values like [[population:=1,305,736]]. The current version summarizes all such facts in each page and can export them as RDF. It's a simple extension, but once it's implemented in Wikipedia, you could query for, e.g. the population of every major city in California. Doing such semantic queries using Google is basically impossible, you'll just get a list of pages and have to read and filter each one to create your own list.

Sharing semantics between datastores would require people agreeing on ontologies, which according to people like Clay Shirky is indeed a pipe dream. I'm not so sure, that's like saying categories in Wikipedia are useless because they're disorganized. Just using the Dublin Core metadata to identify authors of information in a common way would be a big breakthrough, and there are simple enough ways to do it in XHTML that I think it'll pick up steam in the next few years.

Two wonderful articles on why micropayments are a bad idea:

The Case Against Micropayments
Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content

The general theme is they don't really take users into account.

they will fail, not because they backslide on moral principle, but because so many people have wildly differing, often self-contradictory, irrational, or as in your case, ill-defined ideas

Kind of like how a country can fall apart when people interpret the intent of the founders differently?

It's almost as if a group is its own worst enemy!

http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.h tml

This fallacy is revealed in I, Pencil - My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read which explains that while not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make a pencil , pencils nonetheless exist in abundance.

The Reality of Markets by Russell Roberts speaks of "phenomena that are the product of human action but not of human design": examples include language, economies and the WWW, all which work with neither oversight nor designer.

In contrast many designed systems (CORBA, The Semantic Web, RDF, Ontologies) remain stunted and show little progress. Clay Shirky's writings: Web Services: It's So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work and The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview provide illuminating insight into why.

... and that is a good thing.

See: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview.

Metadata is just data with a non-standard interface. If you get rid of the non-standard interface you will live much happier.

It seems to me that the entire point of the wiki is to do away controlled vocabularies. http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html is a good read about these kind of things - he doesn't talk about wikis in particular, but the same things apply.

Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.

The problem is not an inability to ship pennies. The problem is that users don't want micropayments and they never will. (Where 'micro' is in the penny/nickel/dime neighborhood.)

"...micropayments create a double-standard. One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something while also suggesting that the fee charged is functionally zero. This creates confusion - if the message to the user is that paying a penny for something makes it effectively free, then why isn't it actually free? Alternatively, if the user is being forced to assent to a debit, how can they behave as if they are not spending money?

"Imagine you are moving and need to buy cardboard boxes. Now you could go and measure the height, width, and depth of every object in your house - every book, every fork, every shoe - and then create 3D models of how these objects could be most densely packed into cardboard boxes, and only then buy the actual boxes. This would allow you to use the minimum number of boxes.

"But you don't care about cardboard boxes, you care about moving, so spending time and effort to calculate the exact number of boxes conserves boxes but wastes time. Furthermore, you know that having one box too many is not nearly as bad as having one box too few, so you will be willing to guess how many boxes you will need, and then pad the number.

"For low-cost items, in other words, you are willing to overpay for cheap resources, in order to have a system that maximizes other, more important, preferences. Micropayment systems, by contrast, typically treat cheap resources (content, cycles, disk) as precious commodities, while treating the user's time as if were so abundant as to be free."

Bonus article here.